The questions to ask before you hire a bid writer

A review of a charity's funding application is £400 to £750. A review of a tender response is £550 to £950, because a tender response is longer and scored question by question. A grant application or small tender written is £500 to £2,500, a full tender is £2,500 to £5,000, and a month of applications is from £950 a month. Every fee is agreed in writing before anything starts and paid on delivery, and the pricing page shows what moves a job inside its band.

About an hour on a call, plus sending what you already hold: monitoring spreadsheets, last year's evaluation, accounts, the application that got turned down. After that the next thing you see is the finished draft with the open questions to decide.

If the guidance is short and you've written a winning one to this funder before, you probably should, and sending it here to be told that is free. A review is what to buy when the money matters and you want the budget checked before the funder does. Buy the writing when there is no spare week on the team. If you'd otherwise paste the guidance into an AI chat, send that as your draft and a review shows you what it missed.

Every fact in it is something you can produce if asked, you decide the open questions, and you send it in as yours. Ask us for the source of any line and you get back the file it came from.

No, the funder decides that and no writer can. What you get is a document where the figures add up and every answer sits on the criterion it's marked against. The weak points are named to you before the funder finds them, and the fee for the work is agreed in writing before it starts.

Start with a review, £400 to £750 for a charity's funding application or £550 to £950 for a tender response. Either is small enough to sign off and leaves you holding a marked-up draft whatever you buy next. Give them the case study to check, and on miracles nobody controls the funder's decision and nobody here claims to.

Send your deadline with the pack, and whether it can be met comes back with the fee before you pay anything.

No, on a first piece of work you pay when the document is delivered, and a retainer is invoiced monthly.

Tell us and we fix it inside the agreed scope at no extra cost. The scope is written down before we start, so there's a document to check it against.

Yes. AI tools draft and check under a person's direction, and Theo Ilori reads, edits and answers for every document before you see it. If a funder asks for an AI-use statement, you get an accurate one.

Your material is used for your bid only. We don't train anything on it or reuse your evidence in another organisation's bid, and working copies are deleted on request. The detail is in the privacy notice, and if your funder or your board needs a data processing agreement, ask and you get one.

You do, on delivery, and that includes the research as well as the drafts.

Your portal logins stay with you and every message to a funder goes out from your own people, so you read the finished bid and submit it yourselves.

Yes. On a retainer it's standing work every month. On a one-off piece, if you're bidding into the wrong fund or the wrong contract, that comes back before any fee is agreed.

Yes, tenders for contracts and commissioned services are on the same fee bands, and the company page walks through them. Community interest companies and social enterprises fit either page.

Mostly the name. A tender is the formal, scored kind of bid a public body or a large buyer runs. The writing is the same job: answers built from your delivery record against the criteria and the weightings. A small tender is £500 to £2,500 here and a full one £2,500 to £5,000.

You send the pack or the guidance with the deadline, and your last two or three similar pieces of work with what you delivered. If it's a tender, your policies and certificates list too. Then an hour to an hour and a half on a call.

The written answers, the method statements, the social value section and the narrative, yes. Insurance certificates, policies, accounts and anything needing a signature are yours to supply, and you get the list at the start with the dates the tender sets.

If the buyer brings it forward, you get a straight list of what can still be done, and you decide. If it's pushed back, nothing changes and the fee stays where it is.

No, because the evaluator decides, and price usually carries part of the score. What a writer controls is the answer sheet. So every response here is written under the criterion and the weighting it's scored on, and the pricing schedule and the compliance list are checked before the portal closes.

Not as a share of what you raise. On a grant application the fee for the work is agreed before we start, and there is one flat payment on an award above a set size, printed on the charity page. On a company tender there is one win bonus, a fixed amount agreed before any work starts, and the company page prints the three figures.

Reading the guidance or the tender pack and your deadline, a fixed fee for the piece of work, and a plain answer on whether the bid is worth making and why. The free read stops there. Drafting, a read of a draft you have already written, and funder research past the pack you send are all paid work.

Usually by the day. Here a single application is a fixed fee from £500. A retained month is £950 a month at the entry band, for a set number of applications that fit you.

None, either side can end it with a month's notice, and everything produced up to that point is yours.

The fees here are what you pay, and there is no VAT to add. The quote you receive is the document to hold us to.